[Half/Time 01] Half Upon a Time (3 page)

Jack glared at her, not really over the whole pinching fiasco. “Who said we
want
to help?” he muttered.

“Was that what you call kissing me?” the princess asked, throwing him a dirty look. “Helping?”

Jack blushed, angry and embarrassed at the same time.

“The boy was trying to wake you up,” the old man said before Jack could say something rude in response. “He wasn’t sure it would work, since he’s no prince, obviously, but apparently they’re relaxing the standards.”

“He’s not a
prince
, huh?” said the princess, one eyebrow raising as the old man helped her to her feet. Then her eyes shifted to the fairy in Jack’s hair again. “Oh, c’mon,” she said with a weak smile. “Princes? You can’t be
serious
.”

“No princes around here, obviously,” Jack’s grandfather said. “The nearest one’s a good day or two away. But why waste the time when my boy is ready to help? He’s not much, but he’ll get the job done, Princess.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Okay, let’s back up. When you say that word …”

“Princess?” the old man asked.

“Yeah,
that
one,” she said. “You’re not just doing that whole old-person thing where you call girls cutesy names ’cause you think it’s charming or whatever, are you.”

“Certainly not,” Jack’s grandfather huffed. “I don’t
think
I’m charming, I
know
—”

“Missing the point!” the princess said, her voice edging on panic. “
Why
are you calling me a princess?”

Jack pointed at her shirt. “It’s not like you’re hiding it too well.”

She followed his gaze down to her chest, then gave him a disbelieving look. “It’s a
T-shirt
,” she said.

“So you’re not a princess?” Jack said.

“No!”
May yelled. “I’m not a princess!”

“Whatever you say,
Princess
,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing as he glared at her.

“Uh, Your Highness,” Jack’s grandfather said, inserting himself between them again, “why don’t you and Jack go over to our cottage, so you can explain how you ended up here? I’ll go grab something for us to eat from the inn.” When the princess started to object, Jack’s grandfather interrupted her. “Don’t you think we’ll be able to better help you once we know the full story?”

The princess looked like she wanted to disagree but couldn’t think of a good enough reason to do so.
“Fine,”
she said. “Let’s go. But I’m keeping my eye on you both.
Especially
you,” she said, pointing at Jack. “You come at me with those lips again, there’s gonna be pain.”

“Can’t be worse than the last time,” Jack said to her as his grandfather wandered off toward the village’s inn. Jack nodded in the direction of their house, and he and the princess walked
down the path toward it, an awkward silence filling the air as they went.

Not ten seconds after Jack closed the cottage door behind them, the blue circle of fire reopened in midair, and a giant of a man dressed entirely in green dropped out of the center, landing silently in a crouch. The man carefully touched the spot where May had landed just minutes earlier, then glanced in the direction of Jack’s cottage.

The man in green smiled, stood up, and slipped silently into the forest to wait for his prey to emerge.

Jack sat down at the rickety table his grandfather had built. The princess glanced at the table’s other chair, then pointedly took a seat farther away, on one of the tiny beds. Apparently she wanted some distance, something she wasn’t going to get much of in the cramped cottage. With a table, two beds, a chest of drawers, and a fireplace for cooking, there just wasn’t room for distance.

“Okay, let’s get on with this,” Jack said, opening the large book on the table to the marked page … only it wasn’t the page he’d been expecting. Text filled the left page, while on the right—

“What’s that?” May asked, coming over to stand behind him.
She pointed at the elaborate illustration of a man holding a golden harp, facing down a rampaging giant.

“Nothing,” Jack said, quickly flipping to the first blank page. “Apparently my grandfather’s been reliving the past.”

“Did he draw that?” May asked.

“Nope,” Jack said. “It’s a Story Book. It’s actually pretty rare; there were only four made. My grandfather got this one when he rescued an old woman who used to ride a giant goose.” He flipped to the very front of the book and pointed to the picture of his teenage grandfather creeping through a dungeon to free an imprisoned woman and a very annoyed-looking goose. “Anyway, the book writes down any stories you tell it, painting whatever you’re thinking as pictures. It’s not only a good way to keep track of them but it fills in some blanks that most people leave out.”

“So what, it’ll record it?” May asked, raising an eyebrow. “So not only do you have fairies and stuff, you also have magic voice-recognition books? Weird.”

At the mention of her, the fairy in Jack’s hair perked up, spread her wings, and gently flew over to May’s hand. The princess’s eyes went wide, but she held up her palm for the fairy to land on, staring at the creature with wonder. The fairy, though,
just smiled, then climbed up May’s arm and into her hair, burying into it and sighing contentedly.

“That might have been the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” May said. The fairy waved a bit in response, then settled back to fall asleep. “I guess you don’t need technology when you’ve got fairies, huh,” May said, then seemed to realize something. “Speaking of technology …” She reached into a front pocket and pulled out a small, fat card with numbers on it, some of which she pushed a few times. When nothing happened, she frowned and slipped the card back into her pocket. “I figured there wouldn’t be a signal, but it would have made things a lot easier.”

“Well,
yeah
,” Jack said. “We … we don’t get a lot of signals out here. Not anymore. We used to. But they all died. Eaten. By monsters. It wasn’t a good situation.”

May nodded slowly at him. “Sounds … pretty bad,” she said, turning back to the book. “So what, I just have to start talking, and it’ll write down what I say?”

“Try it,” Jack said, flipping back to the blank page.

“Well, I was up later than I was supposed to be, so I had all my lights off,” May said. “I was—” And then she stopped as text began to appear in the Story Book.

“Once upon a time,” it read, “a beautiful young girl disobeyed
her grandmother.” On the opposite page, an illustration appeared, showing May in a dark room, her face lit blue by some kind of glowing square.

“That’s so creepy!” she said. “I didn’t even say I was on my computer!”

“It takes both what you say and what you think, Princess,” Jack said, ignoring the fact that he had no idea what a computer was. “And don’t think I didn’t see the part about calling yourself beautiful.”

“It’s a smart book,” May said, the corners of her mouth rising a bit. “All right, then. I was up late when I heard Grandma coming upstairs, so I quickly turned off my computer and jumped into bed.” Text rose to the surface of the Story Book’s page as May talked, but Jack soon forgot it, as he always did when someone was telling a story. The illustrations were so realistic—it was hard not to stare at them.

“Grandma knocked, and came into my room,” she said, and a new illustration appeared: a woman silhouetted in a doorway, light spilling in behind her.

“That’s my Grandma,” May said, her voice catching a bit.

If she was, the woman certainly didn’t look the right age: Her face was perfect and beautiful, unmarred by any worry or
smile lines. Her long black hair was tied up in a bun, though Jack could make out a white streak or two playing in and out of the hair.

Despite May’s protests about not being a princess, this woman clearly had a royal bearing. In fact, she reminded Jack of nothing less than a queen, even in what looked to be a simple dressing gown.

“Wow,” Jack blurted out.

“Yeah,” May said. “Kinda intimidating, but you get used to it. She told me I had to get up, but she sounded … worried. She said that someone had broken into the house, that they had stolen something: a box she’d always had, a box with a heart on it.”

An illustration appeared of a wooden box with a heart on its front. Jack couldn’t tell much else about it, since most of the box was obscured beneath piles of books, clothes, and other items he didn’t recognize.

“She never let me near that box,” May said. “It was always hidden away somewhere. The only time I ever saw it was when we’d move, which we did a lot.”

“So this box … it was stolen?” Jack asked.

“That’s all she said was taken,” May said. “Not sure why
someone would just steal that, and not take any of our valuables. She told me it wasn’t safe, though. At the time I thought she just meant because someone had been in our house, and they could come back at any time, you know? It made sense. So she told me to get up, that we were leaving. Oh, and she handed me a note with emergency numbers on it and told me to call them if anything happened.”

“Numbers?” Jack asked.

She frowned. “Yeah, kinda useless, though, considering my phone doesn’t work.”

Jack nodded, pretending he understood any part of what she’d just said.

“She wanted to leave right then, so I quickly got dressed and followed her out,” May said, glancing at the illustration forming on the page. “Or, at least, I started to.”

A picture slowly formed of a room more richly furnished than any Jack had ever seen. An enormous bed covered in linens filled most of the room, right next to the large wooden desk that May’s glowing square sat on. The walls were some kind of smooth, uninterrupted stone, white as clouds.

All but one small part, that was. Though the May in the picture seemed oblivious to it, a small, familiar blue flame burned
on the wall right behind her. And inside the blue flame … Jack leaned closer to look.

Inside the flame was a small hand, like that of a child. The hand was reaching for May.

“See?” May said sadly. “This is where they come for me.”

“Downstairs I heard this huge explosion,” May said quietly, staring at the picture of the hand in the flame. “Voices yelling, too. One of them was Grandma, but I didn’t know who the other one was. So I ran to the stairs to look.”

A new illustration began to paint itself onto the page, this one showing May glancing down the stairs to find her grandmother and one of the largest men Jack had ever seen, dressed entirely in green.

“They were talking about something … I can barely remember,” May said softly. Jack nodded, then absently glanced over at the text, where words that May could barely remember drifted up from the ether.
Snow White … betrayal … cursed … Mirror
.

And then three words that made his blood run cold:
The Wicked Queen.

Jack gasped, suddenly understanding who the man in green was, and what might be happening.

“I know, right?” May said, not exactly on the same page as he was, at least not figuratively. “And things are about to get worse, ’cause while my back was turned, the things from my wall attacked.”

The picture showed what May remembered: A vicious monster about half her size leapt at her, a horrifying axe in one of its hands. Behind it, more monsters were swarming in from the burning blue hole in the wall, eager looks in their eyes.

“They all jumped on me,” May said with a shiver. “I kicked as hard as I could, and I know I hit a few, but there were too many of them. They picked me up and carried me into the hallway.”

The new picture showed May held in the hands of the monsters, being presented to the man in green like some kind of gift. Her grandmother’s hands, feet, and neck had all been chained together with huge iron bands, and the older woman looked both furious and worried.

“He asked me who I was,” May said, pointing at the man in green.

“Who might you be, girlie?” said the man in green, according to the book.

“And I called him some names,” May said.

The book printed something garbled.

“They weren’t the nicest names,” May admitted. “Anyway, he told those monsters to take me back to the palace, then to look for something.”

“Find that crown; we need it to use the Mirror!” the man in green yelled in the book.

“My grandmother struggled,” May said, her eyes locked on the illustration, “but he just picked her up and carried her over his shoulder like she weighed nothing. And then he said something I didn’t understand, and another blue fire showed up.”

The next picture showed a circle of blue flame burning on the wall in front of the man in green, who was carrying May’s grandmother into the circle. Inside the circle, Jack could make out some kind of tunnel of the same fire, ending in a second circle. And in that second circle of blue flame stood a figure he couldn’t make out, a figure that looked almost like a woman. Jack shuddered, the room feeling colder all of a sudden.

“Grandma yelled something about how he should leave me behind, that I wasn’t important,” May said, “but he just laughed
and said if she cared that much, I’d definitely be coming along. So they carried me in right behind her. Only …” She trailed off briefly, then shrugged. “Only I struggled while we were in that tunnel. I guess the fire wasn’t that stable, ’cause it didn’t take much for me to knock one of the monsters off balance, and they dropped me. Not knowing what else to do, I jumped.”

She pointed at the picture now painting itself onto the page, of May diving headfirst into the tunnel’s wall, childlike hands reaching out to grab her fleeing form.

“And that’s all I remember,” she said.

In the book, three dots appeared, as if the story wasn’t quite finished.

“That’s when we found you,” Jack said, and a final illustration appeared, showing Jack bent over the unconscious princess, the circle of blue fire still burning in midair, his grandfather looking on with a big smile on his face.

“Right,” May said. “So if you start talking from here, I should find out why you started making out with me?”

Jack blushed. “We can probably skip that part.”